Asuke Castle (Mayumiyama)

En un regard

Le château en bref

Asuke Castle, properly Mayumiyama-jō, crowns Mount Mayumi (301 metres) above the old post town of Asuke, now part of Toyota. It is a Sengoku-period mountain castle: no stone walls or keep, but terraces cut into the ridges, trenches and timber buildings. It was the main stronghold of the Suzuki clan, masters of the mountainous region of western Mikawa and of a network of forts known as the "seven castles of Asuke". Attacked by Matsudaira Kiyoyasu in 1525, the Suzuki then wavered between the Matsudaira, the Imagawa and the Takeda, who held the castle from 1571 to 1573, before finally submitting to Tokugawa Ieyasu. They left Asuke in 1590 when Ieyasu was transferred to the Kantō, and the castle was abandoned. In 1993 the city restored it with rare rigour on the basis of excavations: a watchtower, honmaru buildings and palisades evoke its late 16th-century state, making it the first complete reconstruction of a mountain castle in Japan.